Spicy pizza with peppers and salami

A week does not pass without a pizza in sight.

Long gone are the days when as a student I used to buy a last minute packaged pizza from my local supermarket; I would heat it up on top of the radiator and greedily wolf it all down whilst sitting on the floor. It wasn’t like my mammas, but hunger mixed with laziness and a certain pizza craving was the perfect cocktail for the cardboard-pizza route.

Although most of the pizzas had the same texture as the carton, there was certainly still lots of pleasure from it and probably the informality of it all that I loved most. This is what being young is all about: you are adaptable, easy and you just basically don’t care!

Now, approaching forty and deeply set in my ways pizza has become one of those weekly indispensable customs I feel I would sin if I failed to observe. If you think that making pizza on a weekly basis is a chore then think again. It is like everything else: the more you make the quicker and better you get. And can you imagine how much money you are saving? You can then afford to splash out on good quality ingredients.

Good quality flour in number one: strong bread flour gives in my opinion a fabulous texture to a pizza. It is also very important that the tomato sauce and the mozzarella are both good quality and not too watery; for instance buffalo mozzarella retains lots of water which will result in a soggy pizza.

And after my vegetarian pizza  and  my healthy pizza with rocket and Parmesan  here is a fiery one for you: plenty of colourful chargrilled peppers with spicy salami and a touch of peperoncino (chilly) for a pizza from hell!

• Prep Time : 40 minutes
• Cook Time : 25 minutes

Ingredients

• pizza dough
• tomato sauce – 300 ml
• mozzarella balls – 4
• peppers – 4
• salami – a few slices
• black olives – 20
• oregano or basil leaves
• chilly peppers (optional)
• olive oil with peperoncino or ordinary olive oil

Instructions

Make the pizza dough following the recipe here.

Wash the peppers, remove seeds and filaments and cut them into quarters. Put a griddle pan over a source of heat and when it is very hot lay the peppers on it. Chargrill them until soft for about 10 minutes turning them on both sides.

Spread the tomato sauce (for its density I like passata best) on your pizza base

Now put the mozzarella on top and sprinkle with dried oregano or a few fresh basil leaves

Now the peppers, the salami slices and a few black olives. Add some chopped chilly peppers if you like.

Cook the pizza for about 25 minutes until golden. If you lift it with a fork, the base underneath should be crunchy. Then you will know your pizza is cooked. Drizzle with some olive oil with peperoncino (chilly) or ordinary olive oil.

And don’t forget a glass of properly chilled beer which always makes the best match with pizza

BUON APPETITO!

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